Apple Alternatives

I have been an Apple computer fan for many years - in fact longer than most, through the (very) skinny times when the share price was junk and it looked like the future was dark indeed, if there was any future at all. I have owned macs since the very early models, fond memories of my venerable IIci still stick with me, I had a performa 6400 juiced up to the eyeballs with so much extra circuitry that it weighed twice as much as when I bought it. I have owned powerbooks, macbook pros, a macbook air, a mac book mini, an iPhone, an AppleTV (version 1) and those are just the ones I can remember.

Lately though, the shine has worn off. We have had a bit of a breakup, and like any really good breakup the blows seem to keep coming. From the Apple control over what I may run on my iPhone, through the abandonment of the AppleTV v1 (and the apparent expectation that like a good little customer I will come back for more and buy a v2), to the recent announcement that Java (the platform I have made a career around for the last 15 or so years and, continue to do so) will be deprecated on Mac OS X, it is clear that Apple's direction and my own no longer align even a little.

This leaves the question of what alternatives exist though. Even with the stifling level of control over my decisions exercised (on my behalf?) by Apple, I am honest enough to admit that, when you use it as recommended on the packet, Apple hardware does work very well indeed. For example, the AppleTV, iPhone and Mac Mini combination formed a very slick (if pretty limited) entertainment and multimedia back bone, the experience gave a nice portable remote control through the iPhone interface, the media selection available over the oh-so-silent mac mini (always running) and the AppleTV connected to the TV and audio receiver in the front room filling the house with sound (and sometimes movies, rented from Apple - that side of AppleTV always worked nicely, but it was a bit of a one trick pony).

Apparently I am not the only one thinking along these lines. Gizmodo, PC Mag and others offer plenty of reading on the matter. What follows is my own list of alternatives in use right now as alternatives for the way I used the Apple products in my life. I will start with the easy ones first.

Work / Home Computers

This is dead easy - for almost as long as I have been a mac fan, I have been a Linux fan (indeed, I have been a unix user much longer). Ubuntu linux has come on in leaps and bounds in recent releases and on most of my work machines I have been developing in Ubuntu for several years, in fact I stopped buying mac laptops some time ago in favor of more powerful, less expensive alternatives that run Linux well, and have been perfectly happy. I hear all the time how desktop linux is still too hard for regular people to use (usually from friends who are actually developers) but I wonder how many of them have actually tried? For me, Meerkat (the latest version of Ubuntu) is wonderfully friendly, super easy to install, lightning fast to use (especially on much faster hardware that often costs half of what the Apple alternative hardware does) and in recent incarnations, quite pretty as well.

So this one is easy - commodity PC hardware running Ubuntu Linux. As a bonus, the Java platform works superbly on Linux, and will continue to do so. What is new is that I have begun stripping Mac OS X off of my remaining Apple computers and replacing them with Linux (which works just fine with the hardware and also makes the boxes feel faster than under OS X). This future-proofs these computers beyond the useful life they would otherwise enjoy (once Java starts falling behind or is removed from the Mac OS completely). It goes without saying that Linux allows me to do much more with these machines for their uses here, for example I can share any directory across my home network easily, on any protocol (Mac OS X restricts the directories you may share using, for example, Windows file sharing protocols, unless you buy the server version of OS X - Linux of course has no such restriction - very useful for sharing my large music collection that is kept on an external drive with all of the machines and devices in my house).

iPhone

This has been covered already on my blog, but several months ago I switched to Android (a Nexus One device on T-mobile) and have never looked back. I won't rehash in great detail, but the Nexus One does quite literally everything I used my iPhone for and a lot more, including Google latitude updates constantly running in the background (so that Jackie can see where I am and how long before I get home in the evening, with no effort necessary on my part), integration with Google voice that even seamlessly takes over international calls and charges me 2c per minute through the Google voice plan when I dial to the UK direct, tethering and wifi hot spot included in the regular T-mobile plan and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I take so much for granted now that I don't even think about it (note that I can even tether my Kindle to the Nexus One wirelessly and download books and content anywhere, same with my netbook or laptop).

Recording studio

For a long time the Apple Mac Mini has been the computing cornerstone of my home recording studio (used to record the Java Posse podcast

It still is, but now it runs Ubuntu! Making the switch was dead easy, and the result is a Mac Mini that runs faster, cooler and more reliably. It will no longer talk to my stock AppleTV (which is one of the reasons I modded the AppleTV - more on that later), but it does serve as the backbone for my home multimedia system too, and as a bonus makes all of my music available to me anywhere in the world where I have an internet connection. Skype runs just fine on Linux for video conferencing, pulse audio in recent versions of Linux gives a more flexible alternative to Apple's core-audio for recording purposes (it's like using Mac OS X with audio hijack built in), and Ubuntu has had its own app-store (called Ubuntu Software Center) for a few years now which makes finding and installing software a breeze (and removing it without trace similarly easy too).

As well as the Mac Mini works with Ubuntu though, I probably won't buy another. Options like the Acer Aspire Revo (roughly the same power, much less expensive) or the System 76 Meerkat Ion (still less expensive, much more power) offer far more bang for the buck. I will keep the Mac Mini for a while and then replace it with something like these machines (or whatever is available that's even better at the time).

Home Entertainment

This was the big one to work out. As mentioned, the combination of iPhone, AppleTV and Mac Mini made a slick, if pretty limited, home entertainment system with nice features like genius playlists, remote control from the iPhone, access to my whole music library and so on. Once I got rid of the iPhone and converted the Mac Mini to Ubuntu, the AppleTV was not a lot of use (Apple does not allow the AppleTV to connect to any other kind of server than iTunes, through use of a closed API).

The first thing to do was to jailbreak the Apple TV and install Boxee on it. This alone made the AppleTV ten times more capable than it ever was in stock form, allowing things like Pandora, Hulu and many other internet sources of entertainment to be used from the box. It also meant that the box could once again see my entire music collection over the network from the Ubuntu mac mini. Playback of web flash content is even possible, although the horsepower is not quite enough to make it super smooth (it will do at a pinch if you just want to catch up with an episode of something you missed), however alternative internet content that uses one of the formats it understands natively (h264 for example) play back very nicely, so sources like CNet TV and Revision 3 work brilliantly. Music playback of Pandora, Live 365 and many others are flawless too.

I then picked up an old Roku Soundbridge and installed Logitech's Squeezeserver to drive it (the Roku can emulate a squeezebox, although I would recommend people looking to do this look into the real Squeezeboxes as well, since they can do some tricks like sync with one another in different rooms to provide seamless entertainment throughout the entire house - I love the Roku but I will probably upgrade at some point).

Remote control from the Nexus One is also possible, using an app called SqueezeCommander which I have to say is every bit as slick and easy to use as the iPhone Apple Remote was.

The result, between Ubuntu, Roku Soundbridge and SqueezeCommander is a home entertainment backbone that is every bit as nice to use as the Apple stack was, and can do a whole lot more besides (like playing BBC radio streams for example). Genius playlists were a little tricky until I found the MusicIP plugin for Squeezeserver (yes - it has plugins that are easily installable from the web UI - much like an app store you might say :-) ). In truth, this was a little fiddly to set up, and I would say there is an opportunity for an even easier genius playlist plugin for squeezeserver, and maybe there will be in time. On the upside, MusicIP is more configurable and seems to produce better mixes than Apple's Genius (I don't think I will be the only one to notice that certain tracks *always* seem to get played in Genius no matter what the seed song - it just doesn't feel quite random enough, and of course you can't change that - on MusicIP of course, you can change it to your preferences).

Final Thoughts

There are other advantages to choosing alternatives to Apple. For one, you start getting out of the "it must work with Apple" mindset. For example, earlier in the year we picked up an HD Tivo, which actually looks like it might be the one box that can unify the video media experience in the front room. It can also stream movies found on the network (using a Tivo server that runs on Linux and scans your machine for videos which the Tivo can then see easily). If Tivo can just work out some kind of deal for Hulu content, they would indeed be the one box.

Likewise the Google TV looks very interesting, and has the advantage of integrating very well with my Android phone. Since the new AppleTV 2 will be pretty much useless with my current setup (since nothing else in the house uses Apple now), it is much more likely that we will pick up the Google TV at some point, and I have much more confidence that it will continue to work in a heterogeneous environment and continue to be supported (not to mention that it already allows third party apps to run).

It's also worth mentioning that pretty much every alternative device in use is running Linux. From the Tivo, through the Roku soundbridge, to the Nexus One, Linux has arrived, it's already everywhere, and indeed it really is the alternative to Apple.

Switching to Android: Part 2 - Apps

In the second part of my Switching to Android series, I am going to talk about the apps, including my own (see left - I just uploaded Andro Flubber to the marketplace where people can download it for free).

Apps were probably my biggest hangup with switching to Android, at least now that the hardware is (in the case of the Nexus One at least) slick enough to feel good in use. Apps and the fact that almost every music appliance we have at home has an iPod/iPhone connector on it anyway - more on that particular hangup another time.

So, when I got the Nexus, my first task was to find apps, in some cases equivalents to those I was already using on the iPhone, and in other cases, new apps that you can not get on the iPhone for various reasons (often because Apple doesn't let them through the approvals process).

Let's take a look at some of the app equivalents for those I used heavily on the iPhone first:

• Music and multimedia apps: I came to rely on music applications like Pandora, Last.fm, various internet streaming radio and of course the built in music player on the iPhone. Happily there are equivalents for all of these in Android, and they work better (for one thing, they continue to play music when you switch to another application). I currently have installed on Android: Last.fm (with scrobbling for music you play in other apps too!), Pandora, XiiaLive, Slacker, Listen (for podcasts, includes background downloading), bTunes (a replacement player for music on the SD card) and RadioTime. There are many more, perhaps I am missing some good ones, but these have all my uses covered.
  
  
• Next most used on iPhone was eReaders, in particular Stanza. Sadly there is no direct equivalent for Stanza yet (this is an area where Android is definitely behind right now). Aldiko and WordPlayer are both excellent reading apps, but they don't have the content deals worked out with fictionwise, books on board and others right now to be able to purchase and download books, and as much as I like reading classics, I like reading bestsellers too. eReader.com lets you buy books and has an application for Android, but it's a bit clunky - nowhere near as slick as Stanza. Kobobooks is looking hopeful too, but their reader is so immature as to be unusable (for example, it goes back to the beginning of the book each time unless you remember to bookmark it before closing the app - heaven help you if a call comes in and you forget). If Aldiko can get some content deals, or Kobobooks can improve their player, or if (as I hope) Stanza gets in on the act, it will be a great solution. For now, Android gets a C+ for effort, but eReading is something I used my iPhone for a great deal. One little bonus though is that WordPlayer will read the books out to you using text to speech - a neat feature, but of course not for best-sellers just yet.
  
  
• Next up in my list of importance is Navigation/Maps. Android is almost universally ahead here. Of course, there is the killer feature - turn-by-turn directions in Google maps (with voice, street view, etc.) but in addition there is Latitude (which was rejected by Apple). Latitude on Android rocks - it updates my position for my friends to see in real-time if I turn it on (on the iPhone, you have to visit the web page to get your position updated). Layar is another great app - overlaying the world with virtual labels for all sorts of data. MultiMap and OruxMaps have great support for OpenStreetMap data (including OpenCycleMap), and finally Google's My Tracks rounds out my favorites - tracking and recording of your rides, runs, hikes, etc. with full altitude profile and trip statistics available. Google places directory gets an honorable mention too - see what's around you - I don't use it much, but it's useful sometimes.
  
  There are a couple of disappointments though. Surprisingly, Google Earth is better on the iPhone (no reason for it to be that I can tell, it just is - e.g. no tilt with accelerometer support on the Android one), and another app I used a lot on the iPhone - everytrail, lags significantly in features (on the iPhone it lets you search for nearby trails and download them to follow, on Android it is record and upload only!).
  
  
• Communications next - in particular messaging. Google talk is built right in to android and has background notifications, Hi AIM is a free (at least for now) AIM client that has background notifications too, and there are many other options. The GMail app is easily the best mobile gmail application I have seen. Twitter is well served - everyone knows seesmic, but I have actually been using (and slightly preferring) Twicca myself. Google voice is built right in too - wonderful online service and wonderfully integrated into Android (for example, I can choose to have just international calls routed through Google voice automatically, and it also doubles as my visual-voicemail option). Foursquare has an app that is the equivalent of the iPhone one, and the facebook app that comes with Android works just fine. Android is again ahead here in my judgement, just because of background processes and the freedom of applications to make it onto the platform :-).
  
  
• Productivity and other assorted items: the only real hole here for me is, strangely enough, Google tasks. Just like the iPhone there is the online mobile targeted site, and that works fine as long as you are online, but I was surprised there was no local app that your todo list synced to on Android, hopefully it is in the works (as I tend to live and die by gmail, calendar and my tasks list). Calendar is fine (although I feel it could do with a UI makeover), syncing to the google calendar is perfect so far, and as I mentioned above it has the best mobile gmail app I have seen, but the lack of offline tasks, as well as features like location awareness for tasks, is a hole. For notes, there is evernote, wikinotes (I had to mention it) and many others, News and Weather built in options are good, but there is also the Weather Channel app which is worth a look.
  
  In the other assorted items category, Shazam is available (thank goodness) and works as expected (if you don't know, Shazam listens to music playing somewhere and tells you what it is). The integration with the Amazon music store is good for impulse buys too :-). Google shopper is nice for sanity checks while shopping. Photo management also shines - the ability for new services to register themselves as send options means that you can install flickr uploaders that work with all apps capable of sending a photo, or send it via twitter or IM, etc. Very slick.
  
  
• There are also some apps for which there is simply no equivalent on the iPhone, at least not yet. For example Goggles - which is like Shazam for images (take a picture, tell me what I am looking at). I mentioned My Tracks already, and turn by turn directions in Google maps. Listen - mentioned in multimedia, gives a real podcast client - one that actually just automatically downloads podcasts directly to the phone so that they are available for offline listening whenever you want. SqueezeControl gives me remote control over my squeezebox (there might be something to do this on the iPhone but I didn't think of looking before), and there are neat system features that I didn't have on the iPhone, for example I can see exactly where the power has gone since the last charge (display, apps, phone radio, background file downloading, etc.) and use it to find the battery hogs.
  
  
• I should mention games too. I am not a huge game-player, so this is lower on my list, but it is also a domain where Android is weaker than the iPhone. I was actually quite addicted to Words with Friends while I was using the iPhone, but there is no Android version so I have had to kick the habit. I do have frozen bubble, and a couple of other puzzlers on there, and I also have Shortyz - a kick-ass crossword game written by my friend Robert Cooper, which is slick and almost perfect (will be perfect when it has cryptics available).

So, all in all pretty good, with some concern over gaming - there are good games of every genre to be had, but they are not as numerous as on the iPhone, and many are not as recognizable (you don't see many licensed games, for example Shrek Kart on the iPhone). Perhaps Google should consider some gaming stimulus money, or at the very least a few "gaming on Android" articles to publicize some of the more polished options out there.

However, there are a few things that are not so great with the apps story: 

The top of my list is that you can't install apps onto the SD card still. This was a limitation when I was working as an Android advocate at Google, fully a couple of years ago now, but I can't believe it hasn't been rectified yet. This means you are resource limited by the available main memory on the device, 512 megs in the case of the Nexus. It's pretty easy to fill this up when you like apps as much as I do. Cyanogenmod (which I have now installed) does let you install apps on the SD card, but this is hardly a consumer level operation (rooting and re-flashing your phone is a pretty scary operation when you actually own the phone and have to pay for a new one if you mess things up).

Games seem to be an area where Apple is well ahead. This is less important for me to be sure, but it's going to be a big factor for a lot of people. I think the games situation is complicated by the SD card issue, since games tend to be big, and that will eat up a lot of the available internal memory. Some games designers have worked around this by downloading a big glob of data when you first run it - less than ideal but it works around the limitation. Even so, the glossy games market on the iPhone is a big draw.

The polish is also just a shade less impressive than the iPhone. By way of an example - the headphone remote control (the button on the headphones that can be used to pause, and skip, music playback). It works with other applications, just like on the iPhone, but the whole thing can get a bit confused with multiple music applications running. The way I would expect it to work is that the last music app to play, or the one currently playing, will get the headphone button click event and act on it. In practice, it seems to be a complex enough outcome that it seems kind of random exactly what will happen - instead of the podcast pausing, the music player will start playing over the top, or my audio book will carry on from where I left off. As a programmer, I know these details are a real pain in the butt to get right, but as a consumer I want it to just work. Apple is good at that in spite of (or perhaps because of) their other issues (for example, an over developed sense of control :-) ).

Alright - enough downers, let's get upbeat again.

The biggest plus, and this is huge, for Android applications is that I can write my own. Sure I could theoretically write for the iPhone if I wanted to abide by the following restrictions:

• Sign up and pay $99 for the privilege (Android market costs $25 to register, but you don't even have to pay that just to write and distribute software unless you want to go through the market)
• Agree to some truly heinous restrictions about development, like having to use a blessed language (C, C++ or Objective C), Apple having full rights to allow or block anything I write for pretty much any reason they choose (they blocked Latitude and Google Voice apps for reasons yet to be disclosed, etc.)
• Develop on a Mac. I am a Linux developer, I like it that way, and I like to develop on Linux. Android development just works on Linux, it's dead easy, quick and I can use my existing skills rather than learn a whole new set of stuff which only works on one very close platform
• Agree not to talk about the Apple developer agreement ever (this is a condition of becoming an iPhone developer). Since I co-host the Java Posse and I hate any attempt to control what I can talk about there, that simply isn't likely to happen

So, since I don't want to do any of these things, I am going to develop for Android, and it's dead easy. I actually just finished my first application for Android in 2 years - Andro Flubber. I actually ported this useful utility to Android when I was at Google, but never completed it and lost the source code in the intervening years, so I sat down and did it again.

It took me about 2.5 hours from new project to running app, and maybe an extra 2 for some polish and extra features (like sound, custom background image, etc.). I have since put the source code up on github, and the application up for free on the Android market. The details are:

Name: Andro Flubber (not the best name, but I had to call it something) - a Flub is a mistake in recording, therefore flubber tracks mistakes, and Andro for Android.

Description: marks mistakes on a timeline while recording a podcast, and then emails you a list of the mistakes in the audacity bookmarks format, so you can see where they are in post-production and edit them out.

Source Code: available from github at http://github.com/dickwall/AndroFlubber, not exemplary yet (I should sprinkle in a comment or two, probably some best practices not being observed), but it works and can be improved on. I chose to theme it with the Java Posse logo and put in some other features specific to the podcast, but you can fork the code and customize it yourself if you desire.

App on Marketplace: You can use the barcode scanner on the 2d barcode above to download it, or just go to http://apps.doubletwist.com/Andro-Flubber/-5965901916352705395 or look for Andro Flubber on Android Market from your phone. Right now it requires Android 2.1 - this is just cos I need to download and verify with earlier versions of the API which I will do in due course, but for now I just wanted it to get out there.

Ride through Marin Headlands to the Pub

This weekend, I start my 40th circumnavigation of the Sun. To celebrate (in part - still some celebrating to do yet) Jackie and I took the day off work and rode through Golden Gate national recreation area (Marin headlands part) from the visitor center up to the Pelican Inn in Muir beach, had a nice lunch, and then rode back again.

If you haven't been to this amazing area, the mountain bike trails through it are challenging, strenuous and scary in parts, and they are pretty epic. By the end of the day, I was getting pretty good at bunny hopping over smaller ditches (there have been a lot of channels cut by the very wet winter), I must admit that I took the "discretion is the better part of valor" angle with some of the bigger ditches though - I could have probably made it, but failure would have been painful. About half of the ride was on fire roads and half on single track, including a very scenic and pleasant climb back up to the highest point of the ride on the way back from the pub (this particular trail you can only climb, not descend, and when you see it it makes sense why).

The stats on the ride were (for both directions): about 19 miles total, 3300 feet of elevation gain, 3 hours of actual riding time, 4 hours in total out on the trail (yes, we stopped for photo and rest breaks a fair bit).

This was only Jackie's third serious mountain bike ride, and it was pretty tough going (more than I thought it would be) with some downhills that had me a little concerned (it wasn't the hill, it was the huge water runoff channels that had sunk into the trail that made those very steep downhills a bit alarming). The climbs were pretty tough at times as well - 3300 feet is a lot of climbing in one day, at least for us.

For those interested, the pictures taken for this posting were from the Nexus One, which I also used to record the entire trip in both directions using the My Trails application (which worked flawlessly, and the whole 3 hour trail recording used about 25% of the battery in the nexus one, implying to me that I would run out of batteries before the new gizmo did, most likely).

For those interested, the tracks of the ride out and then back again are on my Google maps. If you want to know more about the route, you can download KML files (for Google Earth) right from the trail map pages. We went in and out on the same route for the most part (except from the first climb after lunch at the pub). This was partly because the trails you can bike on are limited in the park (many are hike and/or horse only). In truth, this wasn't really an issue - the trails actually did seem quite different in each direction, perhaps next time we would try and weave Bobcat trail into the return route or something like that though.

The Felt (new mountain bike) performed admirably and demonstrated that the limitation is the rider now and not the bike :-). Jackie did really well considering her husband made her do a pretty serious ride for only her third time really mountain biking. The various devices estimated about 3000 calories burned so we had a damn good meal last night, and a whole bottle of wine between the two of us (plus a couple of glasses at the hotel we stayed at to get the evening going).

Switching to Android: Part 1 - Introduction

The other day I was lucky enough to get a nexus one for gratis. Actually, strictly speaking it was for writing an application for Android called WikiNotes (I wrote it in my spare time while working for Google  as an Android Advocate - it was intended to demonstrate how intents and the android application lifecycle worked, but ended up being a pretty useful app). When I left Google, Dan Morrill kept up the development of the app and submitted it to the android marketplace where (from reports) it has done reasonably well. Anyway, just a few days ago I picked up my shiny new Nexus One - a nice, but unexpected, reward (maybe some karma catchup?).

I decided that I would write up my experiences of switching to it from the iPhone 3G that I have been using for the past 18 months, and I intend to be honest, both with praise and criticism, as I switch to the new device (which I will be doing - I have already decided that much).

The Nexus One came to me at a good time. I have been becoming less and less satisfied with the iPhone, primarily because I use it so much and the seemingly small limitations that Apple imposes on how I may use their device have grown over time into much more serious impediments. I will cover these limitations in detail as this series goes on, and discuss how Android improves on them (or in some cases doesn't! Life is  not perfect in the Android world either, but it is better).

So let's start with a few of the higher level niggles with the iPhone. Of course, top of the list is lack of background applications. For a multimedia device, inability to keep applications like pandora or last.fm running in the background is extremely irritating. I jailbroke my iPhone to get around some of this, and could after a fashion listen to Pandora when replying to an SMS for example, but it all relied on me enabling backgrounding for that app, and it was far from a smooth user experience. Apple just announced that backgrounding was being added to the 4.0 iPhone OS, which is great, but apparently not for older devices like mine because they can't do it. Ummm, yeah, actually they can on jailbroken devices, and I am sure apple could make it smooth if they wanted to, regardless - I am out of that scene now.

Another one is that my battery life is nowhere near where it used to be. This is not due to jailbreaking (it has been that way for over a year), but more to do with the service cycle of Li Ion batteries, and the fact that they don't hold their charge in the same way after a year or two. Not a problem in most phones, but of course I can't just take out the battery and replace it with a fresh one. That's just lame, and I didn't realize how annoying it is until now. I could take it into an apple store to get it changed, but really, why? Why can't I just put a new one in myself?

So - enough of the iPhone, for the rest of this blog posting I am going to stick to my first impressions of the Nexus One. More details will be in future postings.

The Nexus One is the first Android phone that (in my opinion) measures up to the build quality and overall slickness of the iPhone (don't get me wrong - control-obsession aside, Apple did put together a marvelous device). The Nexus One is what android devices should have been all along.

The device is slim, slick and feels well built. It has an easily replaced battery, easy access to the SIM card, and a micro SD card slot with a 4G card provided with the device (but capable of taking 16G or maybe even 32G in the future). Easily replaceable storage. A nice feature (especially for large or varied media collections).

The first stumbling block was the connector. I had expected the now-defacto standard mini-USB, but it was something different - what turned out to be a micro-USB. Apparently this is the wave of the future, but the future does not yet seem to be here - a check at Target for example shows a ton of mini-USB chargers and cables, but nothing micro-USB yet. It wasn't hard to find some inexpensive converters at amazon.com though: http://tinyurl.com/y8g7rxs so I ordered a couple for all of my power chargers and cables that already use mini-USB.

The battery life is, as everyone seems to say, pretty much the same as the iPhone. The gauge is a little more honest (my iPhone reported itself as fully charged for half of the day, then started dropping quickly, while the Nexus One seems a little more linear in its estimations). One nice thing is that road warriors or power users can put in a double capacity battery (with a bulging battery cover to match). This will spoil the sleek looks, but it's a flexibility that iPhones can only get with awkward external battery pack options.

Here are a few more high-level things I have noticed about the Nexus One compared to the iPhone:

• Audio quality through the headphones is at least as good as the iPhone, the included headphones sound fine but are a bit less comfortable than the white iPhone standard ones - either way, much higher quality sounding headphones can be found (I like koss personally)
• Mysteriously, the maximum output from the Nexus is lower than that possible on the iPhone - I am not sure if this is because of some kind of effort to prevent hearing damage. Several third party apps drive the volume much higher, so clearly it is not a hardware limitation
• The speaker built into the nexus one sounds more tinny than the iPhone - this includes the ringer audio sadly
• The mic is phenomenal, eliminating almost all background noise, and this translates to much more clarity when speaking to people, and might explain some of the eerily accurate speech recognition that the phone is capable of
• The animations are slightly more jerky than the iPhone, for example list scrolling or app-starting, but not bad by any means. The overall speed seems much higher than my 3G (although the 3GS is probably as fast). It does feel nice and snappy in use
• The screen is amazing - high resolution, smooth fonts, vivid colors
• Multi-touch works well, and typing on the soft keyboard is familiar from the iPhone and just as easy

There is, of course, plenty more to say, but I think that's good for part 1. In the next blog posting, I will take a look at the applications I used most on the iPhone, and their equivalent (or lack thereof) for Android.

The universe and many faces of the Doctor

I have been meaning to write this article for a while now, I was even going to do a lightning talk about it (or something related) at the recent Java Posse Roundup 2010 but I ended up giving up my slot because of the numerous other interesting talks in waiting there. Finally I will get my thoughts out there about Doctor Who. This is a timely blog post because the new Doctor is about to start his journey this weekend.

I initially had the idea to write this during the excellent Codemash conference earlier this year. One of the openspace sessions there was titled something like "Doctor Who: The End of Time - a.k.a. the saddest thing I have ever seen on TV". That got me thinking, there is some kind of disconnect here. Sure, it was sad to see David Tennant's Doctor regenerate, and the whole thing was handled tastefully and sympathetically, but I didn't find it that sad, in fact I look forward to what's next.

I believe the difference is that, being English, I grew up with the Doctor, and not just one Doctor, but many. David Tennant (who did a fantastic job playing the Doctor) is the tenth person to do so:

These are the (now 11) faces of the Doctor. I first started watching the series with Jon Pertwee (the third face here, sort of strict and matter of fact, slightly pompous and very clever) back when he was stranded on earth, the TARDIS couldn't travel, and he had a flying car (he was attached to UNIT as a special advisor during this period of Doctor history). He was replaced by Tom Baker (zany, long scarf and curly hair, and with a love of jelly babies), and for me Tom Baker will always have a special place as "the" doctor, since those were my most formative "doctor" years.

I remember the sadness when Tom Baker regenerated. Time Lords can escape death by regenerating when the damage to their bodies is too great. Regenerating brings a new physical form and a new personality for the Doctor, while retaining all the memories of the former incarnations. This allows the new actors to take the character in different directions, and play to their own strengths and personalities, without which I believe the role would get stale and unpopular with new actors.

Tom Baker though was replaced by Peter Davidson who took the role in a new direction, that of a "very English" cricket loving gentleman who was very caring and somewhat bumbling when it came to technology (like control of the TARDIS for example). It was then that I realized how the changing faces of the Doctor kept the role interesting and the series alive and new. It is not healthy for the same actor to play the Doctor for too long, however much you love their portrayal, because eventually it will harm the story telling.

After a few years, Peter Davidson gave way to Colin Baker, again there was sadness in the transformation, but this time for me there was also curiosity to see where the story would go next. At first I really didn't like Colin Baker in the role - he took a new approach to the doctor, very arrogant and blustering, but he won me over in time and has become a firm favorite (even now in the audio adventures - more on those later). His arrogance was nicely tempered with a tendency to be quite wrong about things, and this brought his portrayal back into the sphere of human fallibility, and made it accessible (yes, I know the Doctor is not human, but in some ways he is a model for the way I wish humanity was).

Colin Baker was then superseded by Silvester McCoy who played the role until (it looked like) the end of the series in 1989. Silvester's portrayal had elements of a kindly but strict wise old grandfather figure, and also a kind of "universe weariness" of seeing too much evil in the universe, but at the same time some incredible understated bravery and some pretty epic decision making.

In 1996, Fox, Universal and the BBC collaborated for a made for TV movie, where the baton was passed to Paul McGann. The TV movie it was hoped would pilot in a new series but this never happened, and most people assume that this was the only outing Paul McGann got in the role. To appeal to a more american audience, McGann's Doctor was a little less thought and a lot more action (at least in the movie), the action vs. thought side has been played down in the Big Finish audio productions, where McGann's Doctor has had some of the most epic adventures of any of the doctors and has been quite prolific. McGann's Doctor is perhaps one of the most admirable and heroic even so, willing to sacrifice everything for what is right, and both thoughtful and non-judgmental. One of my favorite performances.

When the series came back to TV in the mid 2000's, Christopher Eccleston had taken over (we never saw the regeneration of McGann to Eccleston - at least not yet). Chris Eccleston only did one season, but was very memorable and fun in the role. In the intervening time it was revealed that the Doctor had brought about the end of the great time war, eliminating the Daleks but also his own people (the Time Lords) in the process, leaving him with great sadness and personal demons, but continuing to fight the good fight. He made a good doctor, and even better, because we never saw the transition of 8 to 9th Doctors, there is ample chance to fill in that gap - something that is rumored for a big screen movie that may or may not happen - this would give both McGann and Eccleston another outing in the roles, and is something I would love to see).

Then Eccleston's Doctor sacrificed himself to save Rose and David Tennant's Doctor took the helm. Clever, knowledgeable, a bundle of crazy energy, and somewhat judgmental and  even dangerous at times (I was alarmed when, in the Waters of Mars, he proclaimed that he was the winner and could do no wrong, that is very scary to hear from a character that commands the kind of power over the currents of the universe that the Doctor has). David T. has done a brilliant job in moving the Doctor's story forward, and in some ways the end of his regeneration (with the likely path ahead of becoming corrupted from the power of being the last Time Lord standing) is good timing.

The reason for all this explanation, well I hope to convince American viewers who found the Regeneration of Tennant's Doctor as the saddest thing they have seen on TV that this is part of the cycle, and not so sad at all. The 11th Doctor will be taken over by Matt Smith, and I can't wait to see where the character and the story goes next. Another reason I am not sad though, is that the nature of the Doctor is that he lives on in all forms.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the excellent Big Finish Productions continuing audio stories of the Doctor. These currently feature the 5th (Peter Davidson), 6th (Colin Baker), 7th (Sylvester McCoy) and 8th (Paul McGann) and feature the original actors, along with most of the original actors for the various companions through the Doctor's story. These are excellent stories - I can't recommend them highly enough, and as a bonus you can listen to them while you commute, mow the lawn or do other stuff. It's great to hear even more adventures with these Doctors, all of whom seem even more unique and original when hearing their adventures interspersed with each other. It's also great that Paul McGann really got to bring his excellent potential to the role in something more than the one 90 minute outing he had before.

So, in closing, don't be sad for the old Doctor, be happy (and excited) to see what the new one does.

One more thing though - according to the lore of Doctor Who, the Doctor only gets 12 regenerations, so unless something changes, we are getting pretty close to the end of the line now.

Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Day 4

The 4th and final day of the Java Posse Roundup 2010 went off very well. Sessions included several business oriented ones (which I skipped), tips for IDEs, Functional/OO hybrid languages and increasing adoption, happy programmers, version control options (git, mercurial, svn, etc.), code reviews and a lot more.

Afternoon I mixed and published episode 300 of the podcast (which we recorded on Thursday night). We had a lot of snow during the day and it was still snowing pretty hard in the afternoon, so after getting the podcast out, I went and joined the group watching Hitchcock's Vertigo in front of a warming fire and hacked with Tor on the ZenWriterFX application a bit more (as well as transitioning to Mercurial on Bitbucket in the hopes that it would be a bit more user-friendly than git with Github).

Last night we headed out for a pretty spectacular meal at Django's up at the resort. Lots of small taster dishes, and some amazing food (and wine too). Had fun riding back down on the town shuttle as well, where we had pretty much the entire bus singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall :-).

Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Day 3

Wow - that was a hoot. So the three sessions this morning were fun, and a small departure for me (even one on business matters for session 2). We covered higher level concerns - definitely back to a bunch of nuts and bolts tomorrow (including a git/svn/mercurial etc. comparison and a session on increasing acceptance of functional languages).

In the afternoon I headed out with Jackie for some more cross country skiing - one of the intermediate trails (I fell down a couple of times, but I also got down some hills pretty well and even figured out how to turn the direction I wanted - I don't think I will be competing in the winter Olympics any time soon. We did find a mostly snow covered disc golf course on our travels though, so if I come out in the summer I will be bringing my discs.

We just got back from the recording of Java Posse episode 300 which was a ton of fun (I was worried it was too long, but people say that the time flew by). That episode will be up in the next day or so, in fact tomorrow afternoon I am planning on demonstrating the full process of mixing, editing and publishing a podcast for anyone interested.

Java Posse Roundup 2010 - Day 2

Day 2 update from the Java Posse Roundup 2010.

Three sessions this morning, there were some good choices but in the end I settled on my own proposal (about clouds, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, etc.), then one about standardizing development across different application teams within a company, and finished up with what programming will look like in 25 years. All good, but I am looking for some more technical stuff tomorrow.

This afternoon, a bunch of us skipped the usual snow sports in favor of some extra technical discussions and demos. In the picture you can see the rigged up projection screen (a sheet over the fireplace in the house we are staying at. It worked pretty well. I led a study group on Scala, and I think picked up a few converts (people who had thought it was too complicated before now), and Fred Simon of JFrog led a discussion of build tools that improve on maven - the upshot is take a look at Gradle, and possible the Scala simple build tool (SBT).

More lightning talks tonight - last night's ones were a hoot, culminating in a fire eating demonstration (outside) by Bill Pugh - how many conferences can you say that you see a fire eating demonstration.

Day 1 of the Java Posse Roundup 2010

Today was the start of the conference proper - the traditional intro/meet and greet, and the first two sessions (I took non-SQL databases and a session on Scala, but all the sessions looked good and it was hard to pick (well, OK - not *that* hard :-) ).

Non-SQL databases was a lively discussion about key/value, document oriented, column oriented and connected graph databases, and where it makes sense to use them. Of course, there are not usually "right answers" at the end of these sessions any more than there are in real life, but the theme was that it makes sense to use not only SQL in some cases, but that relational DBs still bring a ton of value, and if anything the new kids on the block have a lot left to learn from the old guard too - in particular when it comes to reliability, maturity and APIs.

The Scala session was more of a "what's it all about" kind of thing - with some discussion about whether the Scala learning curve is too high (it's definitely manageable), how to get into it (scalatest and soon hopefully scala-koans), whether it's enterprise ready (we think so) and the importance of a language visionary to give a language direction, as well as the trade-off between always maintaining backwards compatibility versus the freedom of being able to make breaking changes to improve a language.

After that we christened the snow with some cross country skiing, man that's fun but hard work. Tonight we have lightning talks, where I will be doing 5 minutes on genetic calculation 101 (based on some of my work at Navigenics).

So far, as always, people seem to be loving the conference - at approximately 60 people it's our largest ever (and certainly feels like it - if we get much large we will need to change venue). People are also engaging with each other really well this year - about half the attendees are alumni, and half are new, which is a great mix for keeping the flow of the conference going but still getting an injection of new ideas - an essential part of a healthy conference and community.

Day 0 of the Java Posse Roundup 2010

The day finally arrived, and we had our (now traditional) day 0 of the Java Posse Roundup. This is the day before the conference officially starts, and is comprised of all day coding dojos and other fun events.

This year, Bruce Eckel organized an alternative business day as well - discussions around the issues of developing a business and moving it from a small startup to a larger concern without losing the spark of what makes it unique and fun among other things.

Another group went off to do a functional coding dojo covering multiple languages including Scala, Clojure, Fantom and others - including working on Koans (something close to my own heart and the subject of a future blog post).

The remaining two groups attempted to create the same application in two different environments. The application in question was based on ommwriter - a distraction free writing tool with a very nice user interface. One group got as far as they could with GWT to create an ommwriter-like tool, and hit some problems with interactions between HTML 5, database storage and the hosted mode in GWT - after working through those issues they came up with a pretty good result.

The group I was in did the same thing, but using JavaFX. You can see the results so far in the screenshot below (although there are background sounds and key clicks which don't come out in the screenshots of course :-) ). There is also a fade in panel of controls which doesn't have any icons in yet (soon).

We faced many of our own problems - some with JavaFX (Linux sound support is flaky at best, and crashes the JVM at work) and many more with github in a very active multi-developer environment, but all in all it was a pretty good day and it's always fun to do some buddy programming with Tor Norbye.

More bike map resources

Yesterday I blogged about the new bicycle layer and routing feature in Google maps, which is excellent and very welcome. It's not the only option though, so I thought I would share a couple more options for finding bicycle routes.

The first is http://opencyclemap.org which is a fantastic resource for cyclists. Here is an example showing the coyote creek trail (part of the same trail I showed on Google maps yesterday):

Pretty isn't it - yes, and useful too. For those who don't know, opencyclemap.org and the site it is based on (openstreetmap.org) are the source of some amazing map data, more detailed than anything else I have seen in the US, and the data has some advantages over that available from Google maps right now, namely:

• Available in other countries - someone responded to my blog post yesterday that they didn't have data in the EU yet, but openstreetmap (and consequently opencyclemap) data is pretty complete in many countries.
• It has height contour data, very useful for planning your ride to see what kind of workout you are in for.
• It is user-supported. OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap data is a bit like geospatial wiki data. If you know of a cycle (or other) path or road that is not on the map, you can add it. I have added a couple of paths I know of already, and it's pretty easy.
• Off road (mountain bike) trails are on there as well, take a look at the following shot of part of Henry Coe park (near Morgan Hill) which has a lot of fire roads and single track:

Wonderfully detailed.

There are a few things Google maps does better though:

• It's not always clear from opencyclemaps.org whether what you are looking at is a paved (road bike friendly) trail or a mountain bike track. If you want to do a road ride, the new cycle layer in Google maps is probably better. If you want to go mountain biking, OpenCycleMap has a lot more detail for that.
• The OpenCycleMap servers are slower - naturally the Google maps server has a lot more performance and responsiveness.
• At least on the OpenCycleMap site itself, there is no automatic routing option like there is on Google maps. You will have to figure out your own route from the data.

On the go, if you have an iPhone, I recommend checking out the OpenMaps application, which has both OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap data available. It is well worth the few bucks it costs on the app store. It has some really useful features on it like:

• Download the street or cycle map data for offline usage (if you are going out into the wilds, this is probably a good idea). You can choose the detail and size of data to download when you ask for the tiles.
• It has routing! You have to set a start and end pin, and maybe some route pins, but it will then find a nice route using bike paths and tracks - very useful in the wilderness.
• You can carry it on your bike - on the handlebars even if you get the right kind of adapter.

OpenMaps for the iPhone

If/when I move to Android, this is one of the must-have apps I am going to need to find an alternative for.

Bicycle routing now in Google Maps

I am rather excited about this feature, although it seems like it has been a long time coming. Google maps now has bicycle paths and bicycle routing, including estimated times.

Under the More… menu you can see the new bicycle layer. Turn that on and you can see recommended bike routes and bike paths. Better yet, maps will now route along these paths if you choose the bicycle routing option when you get directions, in fact it will favor them. Here is a snippet taken from my bike ride home:

Notice the coyote creek trail is highlighted and selected for the route. This is a longer ride than just following Monterey road, but is vastly preferable in terms of the quality of the ride and I was delighted that maps now knows it can route along those bike paths and does so.

The estimated time is a little higher than I know it to be (I can do the ride in about 55 minutes, Google estimates 1 hour 17), but that’s no worse than the driving estimates tend to be. This is fantastic news for cyclists.